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Comment by gregatragenet3 | Hacker News Reader

A side note but something that this article relates to. Here in Pacific Beach California, the traffic engineers have created a perfect storm of pedestrian danger. See, they've installed these lighted flashing crosswalk signs activated by a button on a pole. Awesome idea, as a pedestrian I can hit a button and think that drivers are alerted to my crossing.. as a driver I no longer have to search the shadows on sidewalks for pedestrians because of the lights. Now as a pedestrian and a driver I'm conditioned to depend on the lights.. but now that they've been in place for months the lights are failing and public works doesn't replace them regularly. We now depend on the lights to keep peds safe, and their unreliability is an accedent waiting to happen.

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London is the opposite: red lights are merely advisory for pedestrians. People just cross the streets. That has trained drivers to be very attentive.

Add in that usual London traffic moves at about bicycle speed, and the central part of town is a very human friendly place.

Beijing is the opposite: red lights are merely advisory for drivers. Cars just cross the pedestrian crossings. That has trained pedestrians to be very attentive.

It's pretty great, and the bike lanes just keep getting better.

Yes. It's gotten so good that I feel the main impediment to cycling has become air quality rather than cars.

Those factors seem to be related, don't they? b^)

At most tangentially.

I am glad they added a new "t-charge" (similar to the older congestion charge) to specifically target cars with worse emissions recently.

This is known as a beg button.

As in, pedestrians unquestionably have the right of way, but since our cities are so overtly auto-oriented, we make the pedestrians beg for their rights by pushing a button. These are emblematic of the spectacular failures of urban design that happened in the USA in the last 80 or so years.

Sloat Ave in San Francisco installed new cross-walk lights after a student was killed.

However, the lights themselves are ridiculous and will probably get someone killed as well. I've never seen something like this before. Normally, crosswalk lights are yellow, and they flash yellow when someone is crossing the road. Other times I've seen flashing lights on the crosswalk itself to show that someone is crossing. These are great.

The ones installed on Sloat are flashing red lights, but they don't look like a traffic signal. I don't know why they chose this, but it's very confusing and I don't know what a flashing red light means in a non-traffic light context. It's stupid and overengineered, and they should have stuck with something much more conventional, like flashing yellow lights.

Simple: a flashing red light means stop, and proceed if safe.

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/hdbk/traff_lgt...

This all seem bizzare to me. Whenever they install pedestrian lights (often button operated) in my city (not in US) it's always red and green and it's always with red, yellow and green lights for cars.

That's really strange...here in n Boulder we have a lot of flashing pedestrian crosswalks and I'll have never seen a failed light. I suspect the lights should have a lifetime of years and not months.

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